The Odyssey Plot and Ending Explained | Ten Years of the Trojan War and Ten Years of Homecoming, the Story of Odysseus's Family
A beggar is sitting at the palace gates. None of the young men inside, drinking and tearing at meat, recognizes this man in worn clothes leaning on a staff.
Yet this beggar is in fact the master of the house. It is the scene of Odysseus, returned after 20 years, sitting in silence in the home he built with his own hands, watching the men squander his property. The Odyssey is, in the end, the story of a 20-year journey that leads to this very moment.
Those 20 years divide broadly into two: the ten years spent away at the Trojan War, and the ten more years it took to return home after the war ended.
The time the Odyssey actually covers is the latter ten years, and within that, it focuses on the final few weeks. If you keep this distinction in mind first, you won't be confused about why the story begins in the middle of the sea and proceeds by tracing back into the past. The events on the Trojan side belong more to the Achilles myth.
The People Waiting at Home: Ithaca Falling Apart
While Odysseus was away, three people in Ithaca were each enduring in their own way. His wife Penelope, unable to be certain whether her husband was dead or alive, is tormented by the suitors.
The number of these suitors is given quite specifically. Later, when Telemachus counts them for his father, there are fifty-two from Dulichium, twenty-four from Same, twenty from Zacynthus, and twelve from Ithaca itself. That adds up to around a hundred, and on top of them were the serving maids, the herald Medon, the bard, and two men who carved the meat.
The period they had occupied the house was not the whole 20 years. According to the suitor leader Antinous himself, it had been during the time when "three years passed and the fourth was beginning." The 20 years of the husband's absence and the 3–4 years of the suitors' occupation of the palace are entirely different lengths of time.
Penelope held off those few years with her loom. She promised to marry once she finished weaving the burial shroud for her father-in-law Laertes, and every night she secretly unpicked the cloth she had woven by day.
This trick worked for a full three years. In the fourth year, a maid who knew the secret betrayed her to the suitors, and she had to finish the cloth she had been caught weaving. It bought her time, but it was a stopgap that could not last forever.
Son Telemachus was in the most powerless position in this situation. With no father and no strength to drive out the suitors, all he could do was watch his household fall apart.
Then the goddess Athena, disguised as a traveler, arrives, and things begin to shift little by little. Telemachus calls an assembly to publicly denounce the suitors' outrages, and resolves to set out in search of news of his father.
This voyage to Pylos and Sparta may look reckless, but it was a meaningful choice in that a boy who had only sat still began, for the first time, to move on his own. His grandfather Laertes had withdrawn entirely from the turmoil, living humbly on a rural farm—and this quiet seclusion later leads to an unexpected scene.
Beginning on Calypso's Island, Sailing Back into the Past
The point at which the story actually unfolds before us is when Odysseus is held captive on the island of the goddess Calypso. When the gods' assembly decides to release him, he builds a raft and sets out to sea.
But Poseidon, god of the sea, who wants to block Odysseus's homecoming, raises a storm that shatters the raft, and he barely washes ashore on the island of the Phaeacians. Princess Nausicaa, out doing the laundry, finds him and gives him food and clothing.
Yet Nausicaa does not take him in her carriage to the palace. She holds herself back from that, saying she doesn't know what people might say if she brought a strange man into the city.
Instead, she tells him to wait in the poplar grove sacred to Athena by the road, and to walk in alone around the time her party has all entered the city. She even adds the advice not to kneel before the king, but to grasp the knees of Queen Arete, her mother, first.
Odysseus does as she says, waits in the grove, and heads to the palace alone. Athena, wrapping him in mist, appears as a young girl carrying a water jar and guides him to the royal palace. King Alcinous welcomes him and holds a feast.
It is at this very feast that Odysseus reveals who he is and tells the guests, in his own words, everything that has happened to him. So the stories we know of the Cyclops and Circe are not narrated in the order the events occurred, but are conveyed belatedly through Odysseus's own recollection.
Once you know this, it becomes natural to understand why the story begins in the middle of the sea and then moves into the past.
The First Scene of the Retelling Was Not a Monster but a Town of People
The first event Odysseus recounts is not the one-eyed giant we usually picture. The fleet that left Troy first reached Ismarus, city of the Cicones, and they raided and plundered the city.
Odysseus urged them to leave at once, but his men stayed on the beach drinking wine and seizing livestock. Meanwhile the Cicones, who lived inland, came in force, and only after being driven back by these chariot-fighters—losing six men per ship—did they barely escape to sea.
Before any monster even appeared, a single day spent drunk on victory cost the lives of dozens of companions. It can be seen as placed at the head of the tale because it shows where this story's disasters begin.
Then a north wind raised by Zeus strikes the fleet, and the ships, rounding Cape Malea, lose their course and drift for nine days. On the tenth day they land in the land of the people who eat the lotus.
The people there did not harm the scouting party Odysseus sent. They merely shared the lotus fruit, but whoever ate it lost all thought of home and tried to settle down right there.
Odysseus drags his weeping men back by force, ties them under the benches of the ships, and hastily sets sail. This danger, which holds people not with violence but with forgetting, belongs to the same family of traps as the temptations of the Sirens and Calypso that come later.
Only then comes the cave of the one-eyed giant Polyphemus. This episode is so dense with incident, and so weighty that it forms a story in itself, that the full account of the Cyclops episode covers the cave escape and its price in detail separately.
Here we will only note the outcome: because Odysseus, at the last moment, shouted his own true name, Polyphemus's father Poseidon resolved to hinder his homecoming—and this grudge pursued him for the rest of the journey.
One Bag of Winds, and the Day the Fleet Was Lost
The next port of call was the island of Aeolus, keeper of the winds. After hosting Odysseus for a full month, Aeolus sealed all the dangerous winds in an oxhide bag tied with a silver cord and gave it as a gift, leaving only the gentle west wind outside to push them toward Ithaca.
After nine days of sailing, when they were so close that on the tenth day they could see the smoke of the fires on their homeland, Odysseus, who had held the tiller the whole way, fell asleep for a moment. In that gap, his men, suspecting the bag held gold and silver, undid the knot.
The trapped winds burst out all at once, and the fleet was blown all the way back to Aeolus's island. When Odysseus returned to ask for help, Aeolus coldly shut his door, saying he would not help one hated by the heavens.
From here begins the greatest stretch of loss in this retelling. The fleet, rowing for six days across a windless sea, reached the land of the Laestrygonians on the seventh day.
Because the harbor, ringed by cliffs, looked perfectly calm, the ships all moored in a row inside it. Only Odysseus tied his own ship to a rock outside the harbor.
The inhabitants of that land were not people but giants. When King Antiphates seized and ate one of the scouting party on the spot, giants swarmed down from the cliffs, hurling rocks to smash the ships and spearing the men to carry them off.
Odysseus cut the rope with his sword and escaped with his single ship. Not one person aboard the rest survived. The fleet that had left Troy with twelve ships became one in this single day.
So the story does not go straight from Aeolus to Circe. In between, most of the fleet vanished, and every adventure afterward is the story of one surviving ship.
Circe's Island, and the Warning Heard in the Underworld
The one remaining ship reached Circe's island. The sorceress Circe fed the scouting party drugged food and turned them into pigs.
Trying to save his men, whose bodies had become beasts while their minds remained their own, Odysseus received from the god Hermes the herb moly, which blocks magic, and confronted Circe. Frightened, Circe restored the men to human form, and the company ended up staying there for a year.
If you want to look more deeply into this encounter, you can check the full context of the relationship in the Circe myth summary.
Before they depart, Circe tells Odysseus to go down to the underworld and meet the prophet Tiresias. Tiresias warns that Poseidon's anger still burns, but prophesies that as long as they do not touch the sun god's cattle, Odysseus will ultimately make it back to Ithaca.
That single line becomes the foreshadowing of the greatest tragedy to come.
In the underworld, Odysseus meets many others besides. His mother Anticleia tells him how she died waiting for her son, along with the news that Penelope still spends her nights in tears and that Telemachus is holding the household together.
Achilles, who died at Troy, leaves a surprising remark. He says it would be better to be alive as a poor farmhand than to reign over the dead, astonishing Odysseus.
Agamemnon tells the story of how he was murdered by his wife and her lover, and leaves the grave advice not to let his guard down even when he returns home. This advice carries over as one of the reasons Odysseus later moves cautiously, concealing his identity even after reaching his own house.
The Sirens' Song, Scylla's Teeth, and an Irreversible Choice
Back out on the sea, Odysseus and his men must pass the island of the Sirens. As Circe had instructed, the men's ears are stopped with wax, while Odysseus himself, who wanted to hear the song, passes by lashed to the mast.
Thanks to this arrangement—so that even if he succumbed to the temptation, he could not move his body—he survives hearing the Sirens' song unharmed.
But at the very next passage, the strait of Scylla and Charybdis, the price could not be avoided. The six-headed monster Scylla snatches six of his men, one in each mouth, in an instant. It happened before Odysseus could do anything about it.
Barely past that place, the company lands on the island of the sun god, and here the worst choice occurs. Running out of food and starving, the men slaughter and eat the sun god's cattle while Odysseus sleeps.
These were the very cattle Tiresias had warned against. The result was horrific. Zeus shattered the ship with a lightning bolt, and every man except Odysseus drowned.
Of all who had set out together, Odysseus was the only one to set foot on Ithaca's soil alive. His washing up alone on Calypso's island was the direct result of this shipwreck.
Why Odysseus Did Not Knock on the Door Even After Reaching Ithaca
Odysseus arrives safely in Ithaca aboard a Phaeacian ship, yet he does not head straight home. Athena casts a mist over him so that he cannot even recognize his own homeland, then appears disguised as a shepherd and confirms his identity to him.
She then transforms him into an old, wretched beggar and instructs him to tell no one yet that he has returned. Instead, she tells him to first visit the swineherd Eumaeus's hut and take stock of the situation.
It may seem strange that a king who survived Troy would approach his own house this way, circling around instead of revealing himself at once. But with more than a hundred suitors entrenched in his palace, and having heard Agamemnon's fate, caution was quite literally his survival strategy.
At Eumaeus's hut, Odysseus has a dramatic reunion with his son Telemachus, returned from Sparta. Father and son begin plotting how to punish the suitors together.
The one who recognized Odysseus, entering the palace disguised as a beggar, was not a person but the old dog Argos. This dog, in his prime when his master left, was now lying neglected on a dung heap dying—and the moment he caught Odysseus's scent, he dropped his ears and wagged his tail.
Argos, too weak even to approach, recognized his master in that instant and immediately breathed his last. It was a reunion no one noticed, yet one bitter enough to bring Odysseus to tears.
An Identity Nearly Betrayed by a Scar, and the Decision of the Bow Trial
Inside the palace, Penelope sits across from the disguised beggar and talks with him at length. Odysseus lies that he is a Cretan who once hosted Odysseus, yet he describes the clothes Odysseus wore so precisely that he brings Penelope to tears.
Then the old nurse Eurycleia, washing the guest's feet, touches the scar from a boar hunt in his youth and realizes who he is. Her startled hand lets the leg slip, the basin tips over, and the water spills out.
The nurse immediately turns toward Penelope. But at that moment Athena has turned Penelope's attention elsewhere, so the wife does not see what is happening in the room.
Odysseus grips the nurse's throat with his right hand and pulls her toward him. And in a low voice he warns her: do you mean to ruin me? Tell no one of this. Having barely passed through this moment when his identity nearly slipped, Penelope then declares she will hold the bow trial the next day.
The condition Penelope sets is to string her husband's bow and shoot an arrow through the twelve axes lined up in a row. The suitors, one and all, cannot even bend the bow and flounder. Antinous even suggests warming the bow over a fire and greasing it, but it was no use.
At last the beggar in worn clothes steps forward and takes up the bow. He examines it this way and that, checking whether a worm has gnawed the horn, then strings it as casually as a bard fitting a new string to his lyre, and shoots the arrow clean through all twelve axes.
Yet he does not reveal who he is at this moment. He only says to Telemachus, "Your guest has not disgraced you." It was not the bow trial but the next arrow that revealed his identity.
The Suitors' Last Day, and How Husband and Wife Confirmed Each Other
Odysseus signals with a nod, and Telemachus stands at his father's side with sword belted and spear in hand. Then, pouring the remaining arrows at his feet and saying he aims at "a target no one has yet hit," he shoots an arrow through the throat of Antinous, who was raising his cup.
At first the suitors think it is an accident. They rage that the strange beggar has hit a man by mistake, and glance along the walls—but neither the shields nor the spears that should have hung there are to be seen. For Odysseus and Telemachus had moved the weapons to the storeroom in advance.
At that very moment Odysseus reveals who he is. Did you think I would never return from Troy? You squandered my property, forced themselves on my maids, and courted my wife while I was still alive, he says. He showed his name only after shooting Antinous, not while drawing the bow.
The suitors were not unarmed throughout the fight, either. At first they had no choice but to draw swords and charge using the tables as shields—but the goatherd Melanthius sneaks into the storeroom and brings out a dozen sets each of shields, helmets, and spears.
It was because Telemachus had left the storeroom door unlocked. The situation flips so far that even Odysseus is briefly frightened at the sight of armed suitors leveling spears.
Melanthius, going for weapons a second time, is caught by Eumaeus and the cowherd and strung up from a storeroom beam. With the weapon supply cut off and Athena joining the fray in Mentor's form, the fight turns again, and the remaining suitors fall one by one.
The maids who betrayed Odysseus and sided with the suitors, along with Melanthius, are also punished without mercy. The band that had trampled the palace for over three years is wiped out in a single day like this.
Yet his wife Penelope does not immediately embrace this man who claims to be her husband. The long years and his unfamiliar clothing left her unable to be sure, and she even fears that a god may be trying to deceive her.
She throws him a test: she orders the nurse to move the marital bed out of the bedchamber. Odysseus flares up the moment he hears it.
For that bed was built by his own hands around the living trunk of an olive tree as its post—it was a thing that could not be moved in the first place. The moment he pinpoints this secret known only to the two of them and one maid, Penelope at last weeps and embraces him.
Twenty years of waiting were confirmed not by skill with a bow, but by a single bed.
Reunion with His Father, and a War That Almost Began Again
It seemed everything was over, but Odysseus still had his father Laertes to face. Even after finding the old man working alone in the vineyard in worn clothes, he at first conceals his identity, posing as a traveler from a distant land.
Unable to bear the sight of Laertes sunk in grief, believing his son dead, Odysseus finally proves himself with his scar and with his memory of the trees his father had counted out and given him in childhood. Laertes rejoices so greatly that his knees nearly give way.
But the peace was not yet complete. The families of the dead suitors come armed in force, led by Antinous's father Eupeithes.
The two sides actually clash. Laertes, whom Athena has filled with strength, hurls a spear that pierces Eupeithes's helmet and fells him on the spot.
Odysseus and Telemachus also press into the front rank, cutting their opponents down. Had things gone on that way, not one of them would have returned home alive.
Only then does Athena cry out in a great voice for the Ithacans to stop fighting. The weapons drop from their startled hands, and they flee toward the city.
But Odysseus pursues them like a hawk. At that moment Zeus hurls a thunderbolt down before Athena's feet. Athena immediately warns Odysseus to stop this fight, or Zeus will be angry. He gladly obeys, and Athena, in Mentor's form, establishes a pact of peace between the two sides, and the story ends.
A saga of war, wandering, and vengeance spanning 20 years nearly gave way to yet another repayment in blood, but barely stopped short. The story that began in the flames of Troy closes with one family and one island swearing to live together once more.